Losing white privilege? Exploring whiteness as a resource for ‘white’ Dutch girls in a racially diverse school

Much research on the role of race in education focuses on young people with a migrant background. The racial experiences of ‘white’ children are under-researched, especially in the Netherlands. This article examines whether ‘white’ Dutch working-class students experience white privilege and if so, how they make use of it as a ‘resource’ in their school settings. Most studies on ‘white’ workingclass students do not take white privilege into account, and most work on white privilege has inadequately disentangled the impacts of race and social class. The ethnographic findings from a Dutch senior vocational school where the vast majority of students are of colour suggest that the whiteness of working-class ‘white’ Dutch students may or may not act as a form of white privilege, depending on their interaction with their middle-class teachers. Due to its intersection with social class, white privilege in this setting appeared to be conditional upon meeting teachers’ expectations.

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